Month: November 2015

Thanksgiving is just a day away! It’s so close we can almost smell it. And at VidMob, we couldn’t be more excited. Because there’s nothing like bringing good food together with family and friends to celebrate all that we’re thankful for (and, because like any well-planned fete, there’s also bound to be something that goes hilariously askew).

So this year, join us in taking your celebrations up a notch by capturing it all—yes, even the I-burnt-the-house-down-deep-frying-the-turkey all—on video. Then we’ll find an editor to turn all of our Turkey Day memories into one epic, “Thanksgiving Dos & Don’ts” video that we’ll be sure to laugh about for a lifetime. To join our project by adding your clips & pics from this Thanksgiving, click here.

Below we’ve rounded up a list of some of our favorite “Do” moments to capture this Thanksgiving…as well as a laughable list of “Don’ts” that, even if Mom might not be so psyched to see occur, we’d sure as hell be happy to find in our video (in case you feel like adding an extra dash of chaos to your Thanksgiving spread this year).

Do

Prepping & Carving the Turkey: The bird is the word on Turkey Day and the main event of most Thanksgiving meals. So, whether you’re deep-frying, basting, or even going Tofurkey this year, capture how you do it big.

Family Football: A classic T-Give pastime that you can fondly remember…or use as proof that it was, indeed, a touchdown.

Greetings: For many, this time of year brings family and friends from all across the globe back together again. Capture each guest’s reaction to these special reunions as they walk through the door and greet one another.

What You’re Thankful For: Give thanks! Ask each guests to say what they’re thankful for this year.

Your Special Traditions: Every holiday has its special traditions, and no two families celebrate the same way. What makes your Thanksgiving unique?

Special Recipes: Dad make the best mashed potatoes this side of the Mississippi? Never had stuffing as good as Grandma’s? Show it on video! And don’t forget to take a few beauty shots of the dinner spread.

The Little Moments: Sometimes, it’s the seemingly irrelevant moments that can wind up making the best video memories. So go ahead and capture those after-meal food comas and sleepy yawns amidst the dinner table. Go ahead and pan in on your favorite decorations, or catch a shot of the door right before you arrive to the celebration—because it’s all these small moments strung together that make your holiday experience yours.

Don’t

Tackle Your Uncle with the Bad Hip in Touch Football: Because no one wants to eat their Thanksgiving meal at the hospital.

Deep-Fry the Turkey in the House: Sure, it might be cold outside. But like we said above, no one wants to eat their Thanksgiving meal at the hospital…or at the firehouse.

Unzip Your Pants to Make Room for More Food: Those food comas are a doozy, and can put you at serious risk for forgetting to re-zip. Let’s not scar anyone with your unsightly undies right after they’ve finished a big meal!

Show Up Really Late: While it’s arguably rude, it’s also a surefire way to get stuck eating only the green bean casserole and soggy leftover potatoes.

Get Too Excited to Carve the Turkey: Because knives are no joke. And, like we said above, no one wants to eat their Thanksgiving meal at the hospital.

Indulge in Overly-Inebriated Speeches: Thanksgiving is a great time to address your loved ones as a group, especially in raising a glass to toast. But first make sure you haven’t had too many spiked apple ciders.

So, how will you be spending your Thanksgiving this year? Show us by adding clips & pics from your Thanksgiving celebration to our “Thanksgiving Dos & Don’ts” project, here. And feel free to share this link with your friends and family to make this video even better. And better yet? Make your very own!

Now that we’re almost a week into going live, we can finally report back with some initial launch stats! Given that, from a consumer and business perspective, we’re a totally unknown brand and, given that we haven’t even been on the market longer than 6 days, we believe that these first stats are very promising. We hope that our Mob is as excited about them as we are—a sign of great things to come.

App Stats

To date, we’re now over 1,100 app installs and over 300 registered users!
Of those 300+ registered users, a whopping 56% of those users have already created a project.

Project Stats

The average amount of total media that a user has submitted is 10 and a half minutes, with a completed video averaging in at 3.4 minutes once accepted as a final draft.

Considering the above, most editors on our platform to-date are finding that these projects take about 2 days to complete, despite the fact that the average user has set a 7 day turnaround time—which has a phenomenally positive impact on an editor’s rating and how the algorithm favors them!

Auto-Bid Stats

To date, 85% of all awarded projects have come from an auto-bid, with the most popular user-submitted category of Family/Kids.

While Business remains the top set category for our editors, the most underrepresented auto-bid categories are Fashion/Beauty; Culinary; and Health/Wellness.

To be clear, there are still many things that we need to make VidMob much better—for both sides of the marketplace. We’ve seen a number of consumers deny the app access to their camera roll and then wonder why they can’t see their photos/videos. (Yup. This is true!) And while this isn’t technically a “bug,” we’ve gone ahead and fixed it. Many editors complained about not being able to “download all” of the media once a project was awarded to them. We fixed that, too. Some users didn’t know that they needed to get into a wifi zone to complete the upload of their selected media. We (you guessed it!) fixed that. Any many more. In fact, we’re going to be keeping a running tab of the feature improvements and fixes on the site, for those of you who are interested in that type of thing.

As we get more and more comfortable with the way that the marketplace is working, we’re going to be slowly ramping up the marketing efforts needed to grow the demand side of our supply/demand equation. In the meantime, just sit back and let your auto-bids do their thing. The work will come to you, and when it does, you’ll get an email from us (and an SMS—another fix based on editor recommendations).

As we continue to grow our platform, know that these stats above will evolve with it. And know that we plan to continually and regularly update our Mob on this information as we receive it. Once we start marketing to the business channel, expect that category to grow, hopefully rapidly.

Lastly, if you were looking for information on here that we didn’t provide, just sent us a note. Let us know what stats you were hoping for and we’ll be sure to include them in the next update!

Here at VidMob we truly believe in the power of human creativity and, as we continue to build our product, we stay focused on our mission of connecting content generators with the creative vision of our VidMob editors in order to create amazing videos.

Today, we expect everything in an instant, and this is especially true on mobile. As we thought about our platform, our editors, the app, and our consumers—bundled with that fact that creativity doesn’t happen in an instant—we knew that we had find a way to give users instant access to editors as soon they were ready. We also had to figure out how to balance that with the expectations of our editors who know that creating something magical takes time and has a monetary value to it. That is how VidMob Smart Bids was born (or as the editors know it, auto-bids).

VidMob Smart Bids help us bridge that gap between instant results and the power of human creativity. The “algorithm” (scary word) or system that we developed and will continue to improve upon, is meant to connect a user’s project to an editor who will find the work both creatively and financially rewarding.

How Do We Do This?

The Match Up!When you’ve configured the fields of an auto-bid, you are telling us exactly what size project that bid should apply for and the price that it is worth to you. So the very first thing we do is find all bids that match the project size. This is based on three factors: the total media submitted by the user (both length and total files), the length of time for the editor to complete the project, and the project’s category.

The Weigh-In! Like any good competition, we weight the bids across many different factors. It all starts with the editor’s profile. We believe that editors who embrace the VidMob platform and take the time to highlight their skills and creative preferences will be the most rewarded by our Smart Bidding system. Before we even look at bid price when selecting results that a user will see, we look first at the relevant content an editor has within their profile and auto-bid. Do they have portfolio items that are relevant to the category that the project is in? Have they published them to MobFeed? What are their project preferences? Have they provided an engaging bio and notes with their bids? If they’ve worked on projects in the past, how responsive were they to users through our messaging system and turn around of drafts for review? What is their rating as an editor? What is their rating for past projects in this category? Etc. We take all these factors (and more) into account when selecting the bid results a user sees.

We believe all editors should have an equal opportunity to find a job through the VidMob marketplace. So, in addition to the above factors, we also look at the amount of active jobs that an editor currently has. Editors that have jobs in progress might not show up before editors that currently are not working on any project. We want to be fair, after all!

Fair Market ValueAfter all that, then we finally take price into consideration. We look at all bids available for the project and calculate a price curve that represents the low, middle, and high prices of available bids. To prevent any race to the bottom or display of unrealistically high bids to the user, we significantly reduce the weight of those bids that are on the extreme ends of the price spectrum. From there, we present the first set of results to the user.

Favorites Trump AllWe should add that there is one thing that trumps all in the Smart Bid Algorithm—a user’s favorite editors. The main purpose of the MobFeed (and eventually, similar efforts on the web in general), is to enable potential consumers to curate a list of favorite editors. When someone sees a video that they like, we don’t want them to “like” the video. We want them to “favorite” the editor. Then, when he or she next creates a project and puts it out to bid, guess whose bids they see right up in front of everyone else’s? That’s right, those folks that they favorited previously. We think this is an awesome way to foster repeat relationships among people who have worked well together in the past, and by building a transactional layer on top of the experience of video viewing around the web, hopefully create a ton of new work for talented editors.

Now What? Well, it’s now up to the users to drive the marketplace and determine the bids that are right for their project. We present them with a limited set of bids to work with. They start to swipe through the results, look at specific bids, play portfolio items, and maybe decide to thumbs up or down a bid. All of these actions impact the next set of results that they see. The more a user engages with an editor’s bid card by opening it, viewing an editor’s portfolio items, etc., the more interested they are in what the editor has to offer. This is why we recommend having a personalized bio and bid notes, as it is a user’s primary introduction to you as the editor.

We know the system is not perfect today and we are gathering feedback in real-time from both editors and users to perfect it for the future. We’re collecting data, we’re collecting feedback, and we’re as committed as ever to make sure VidMob is a video marketplace that works for everyone. We believe in bringing the work to our editors so they don’t have to spend hours every day bidding on projects that they might not win. You set up your auto-bids, sit back, and let the Smart Bids system bring the jobs to you. And if you have any suggestions for how to make the system even better, we’re all ears! Just shoot us a line at support@vidmob.com.

Matt Dubroff, Editor Czar, here. We have been live in the iOS App Store in North America for almost a week, and we have already learned lots of valuable information. Be on the lookout for a blogpost in the coming days that will have some great statistics for you, but in the meantime, we have a couple tips to help you better use our platform.

Respond PROMPTLY to your clients

In our testing, clients who consistently received quick responses (within a few hours) have a much higher degree of satisfaction and are more likely to give their editors high ratings. We recommend you respond within a few hours of being awarded a project or receiving a message from a user, but the quicker the better. Also, our algorithm takes into account the response time in replying to these messages, so quick responses will help you get more work.

In order for your auto-bids to be set up most efficiently, we recommend you watch a video we made earlier this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3_uO0YCYN4. If anything comes up that would prohibit you from working on a VidMob project, please pause your auto-bid.

While we are live in the iOS App Store in North America, we are still a new app and don’t have that many users…yet! We are seeing a steady growth in the number of consumers downloading the app, but please be patient while we ramp up our userbase.

On behalf of everyone at VidMob, we want to thank you for taking the time to sign up and build great profiles in our system! We think we have a very special platform here, and we couldn’t have built it without the amazing feedback you have been sending us. We want to make VidMob the best platform it can be for our editors, and to help us do this, your feedback is invaluable. Please reach out to us at support@vidmob.com with any thoughts or suggestions for how to improve the site, and we will keep working on making better every day.

First, we had a crazy idea to match video content creators with freelance video editors—all directly from a phone. Then, we launched our company to the press and began recruiting editors for our platform. And now, we’ve officially launched our app to the App Store* where you, dear reader, can find it, download it, and begin to create your very first VidMob project (and give an awesome editor a great project to work on!).

So while we’re really excited about the fact that this past year of hard work is finally ready for its big reveal, we’re even more excited about what will get created as a result. Namely, a community where creatives (and the not-so-creatives!) can get together, collaborate, and create some amazing videos. Better videos. Videos you’d be excited to watch on your newsfeeds and videos you’d be proud to share with your friends and family. Videos that can help bring your small business into a new era and videos that will help you to connect better with your own communities. Because, as an app user, the world is as much your oyster in terms of what you can create with VidMob as it is for our editors to gain a unique range of experience and exposure. Because if you can capture it on video, you can create it (and edit it!) with VidMob.

At VidMob, we care so deeply about what we’ve built and who we’ve built it for. And we’re listening to our users and our editors for how we can make our platform the best it can possibly be. As we move forward on the next chapter of this exciting milestone, we encourage you to reach out to us with any questions, concerns, or suggestions for helping us to raise the bar. To make us better. Because we can’t do it without you!

So here’s to launch. To going live. And to anxiously awaiting what the future will bring. To download the app today, click here or search “VidMob” in the App Store*. (And don’t forget to tell your friends!)

It’s your video. Better.

*Currently in North America only. Other iOS and all Android users, we’ll be coming for you shortly! Stay tuned.